Julie Byrne: The Greater Wings Album Review

Few could be entirely whole after losing a family member, chosen or otherwise, but The Greater Wings gleams through the cracks. Byrne’s willingness to take a fresh plunge especially pays off on “Moonless,” self-described as both “a breakup song” and her first song written on the piano. With Marilu Donovan’s harp and Jake Falby’s strings adorning Byrne’s keys and unusually rich vocals, the production has the incantatory power of Talk Talk’s Mark Hollis. The lyrics follow suit in their concise abundance, from “that night at the old hotel” where Byrne’s narrator found “whatever eternity is” to her multivalent reclamation of self, “I’m not waiting for your love.” She ventures further on “Hope’s Return,” a cavernous, strummy reworking of a 2020 collaboration with experimental artist Jefre Cantu-Ledesma in which Somers makes the unexpected, very Sigur Rós-like decision to play acoustic guitar with a violin bow. Or take “Conversation Is a Flowstate,” a gauzy rebuke to a disrespectful romantic partner—an unspecified musician of prominence—that’s once again overstuffed with quotables (“I got blood on the sheets, it’s all right,” she sings, with the gnomic intensity of Destroyer’s Dan Bejar). None of this wayfaring is exactly out of character for Byrne: Following immediately after “Summer Glass,” “Summer’s End” dives headlong into headiness with harp glissandi and lolling chimes, but as a drifting mid-album instrumental it’s not unlike Not Even Happiness’ “Interlude.”

Byrne’s deft fingerstyle acoustic guitar also returns, brilliantly. The opening title track, a gorgeous elegy to Littmann, is silvery chamber folk of Nick Drake proportions: With great economy, Byrne alludes to their earliest shows together before gesturing toward her heartbreakingly positive vision of mourning when she sings, “I hope never to arrive here with nothing new to show you.” Littmann’s absence also looms over “Portrait of a Clear Day,” where Byrne sings in an aphoristic mode, “Love affirms the pain of life.” But wry regret flickers on another guitar-centered song, “Flare” (“I could have done better/You’re not the only one”), while “Lightning Comes Up From the Ground” aches with physical longing (“I tell you now what for so long I did not say/If I have no right to want you, I want you anyway”). This is still the same earnest seeker who once sang, “I’ve seen a double rainbow, I got a complicated soul,” but The Greater Wings is no funeral, and Byrne’s calm assurance renders her words irresistibly commanding.

The Greater Wings ends with an outlier. “Death Is the Diamond” is reportedly the only song on the album that was completely written after Littmann’s death. After a luminous ambient introduction, it is a stark piano ballad cloaked in tape hiss, Byrne’s formidable voice at its most raw. It’s a gut-wrenching final tribute to Littmann, a warm nod to Byrne’s surviving family of choice, and a dazzling encapsulation of Byrne’s implicit argument that love means constantly becoming new. “Alive, moving through dusk/Alive, if only once/You make me feel like the prom queen that I never was,” she sings. In moments of vulnerability like this, Byrne glimpses the sublime.

Julie Byrne: The Greater Wings